Placement of completion marker "le" in combined verbs?

[ThePilgrim]

Hello all,

I'm trying to understand the use of the particle “le” and where it is placed in a sentence.

I'm working on learning Mandarin and so far have been focusing on learning the spoken language and the pinyin representation of it. To this point, I haven't yet studied Chinese characters, so please excuse my use of hanyu pinyin in asking this question.

If I wanted to ask someone if they had lived in China, instinctively, I would think that this would be correct:

Nimen zhu le zai meiguo ma? – This sounds right to me, because the “le” here is showing that the “living” is completed while the “zai” shows the location.

Is this correct, or would it be correct to say “Nimen zhu zai le meiguo ma?”?

Thanks for your help!

John

[muyongshi]

Neither works. For more than one reason- first you say china but then you say mei guo. Not good

For this type of thing you don't use 了 you would want to use 过. And something like 你们在美国生活过没有？

住 just isn't that common in this type of construction. You can say you 住 in a country but for lived in, 生活 conveys a more accurate meaning.

[ThePilgrim]

Oops! Sorry, my mistake... I meant, of course, zhongguo. Besides that, I'm afraid I'm unable to understand your answer... I don't know any Chinese characters yet and so I can't read what you wrote. Could you please re-write those characters in hanyu pinyin? Thank you for your help :-)

[renzhe]

In other words (and in pinyin), you want to use the particle "guo4" instead of "le".

"le" indicates a change of state (among other things), while "guo" indicates a longer process in the past.

[ThePilgrim]

Thanks... So where would guo4 be placed? Would it be "Ni3men zhu4 guo4 zai4 zhong1guo2 ma?"? Or would the guo4 be placed after the zai4?

Thank you for your help :-) This is really appreciated.

John

[anonymoose]

Nimen zai zhongguo zhu guo ma?

Less formally, you could also say:

Nimen zhu guo zhongguo ma?

As muyongshi said, often shenghuo is used instead of zhu (although zhu is not wrong), so you could say:

Nimen zai zhongguo shenghuo guo ma?

However, I don't think you can substitute zhu with shenghuo in the second sentence. Anyway, I'm not a native Chinese speaker, so I'm not guaranteeing any of the above.

Edited September 29, 2009 at 03:37 PM by anonymoose

[muyongshi]

Nimen zhu guo zhongguo ma?

I know technically there is nothing wrong with this grammar but it sounds funny to my ears. It sounds like you lived at the country like you would live at a house or a hotel. And you're right the sheng guo definitely wouldn't work here.

[anonymoose]

I know technically there is nothing wrong with this grammar but it sounds funny to my ears. It sounds like you lived at the country like you would live at a house or a hotel.

Yes, I agree, I thought it sounded funny at first also, but I've heard native speakers using it this way. You can check google and find many examples.

[Don_Horhe]

Strictly speaking, wouldn't you still need a preposition in front of 中国?

[muyongshi]

Strictly speaking, wouldn't you still need a preposition in front of 中国?

Not in this construction. It's the same as saying 你去过北京 or 吃过月饼 or any number of constructions....

Yes, I agree, I thought it sounded funny at first also, but I've heard native speakers using it this way. You can check google and find many examples.

Mainly I figured people would be asking more about the US so I did a google search for that and here are my results

zhuguo meiguo 67,700 Results

meiguo zhuguo 555,000 Results

Fairly significant difference to the point that I would wonder if the former could be classified as a "incorrect" (not grammatically but 习惯上) usage.

[Daan]

I can confirm I've heard native speakers here in Taiwan say "zhu4guo Mei3guo2" without any preposition in between, but as others have pointed out, that would be colloquial usage.